Three undergraduates, three professional students and one graduate student have been selected as Young Trustee finalists.
Young Trustees are current students selected to be on the Board of Trustees for two or three years that must “demonstrate an ability to think broadly about the university.”
Undergraduate finalists
Seniors Kacia Anderson, Shrey Majmudar and Priya Parkash are the selected undergraduate finalists.
Anderson, a David M. Rubenstein Scholar (DMRS) and Questbridge Scholar, is pursuing a major in sociology and minor in chemistry. She is from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. and a first-generation Jamaican-American. Anderson is the executive vice president of Duke University Union and sits on the Board of Trustees Strategic Education Committee; she sat on the Undergraduate Education Committee as a junior. She works part-time at Citizen Schools, an educational non-profit. Anderson is also a mentor for DMRS and DukeLIFE, a program dedicated to advocating for students from first-generation and/or low-income backgrounds.
Majmudar is studying public policy and computer science. He is Duke Student Government’s chief of staff, where he also served as vice president of academic affairs, founded a mental health caucus and revamped DSG’s structure to improve inclusivity.
Majmudar founded the Blue Devil Buddies mentorship program, and he advocated for more equitable grading policies during COVID-19 and 2021 Wellness Days. Majmudar serves on the Board of Trustees’ External Engagement Committee and has also served on the Board’s Resources Committee. He volunteers for FIRST Robotics, a STEM education nonprofit. He is from Austin, Texas.
Parkash is pursuing a double major in economics and statistics while minoring in religious studies. While at Duke, she has participated in research projects ranging from Duke’s Cold War architectural developments to using Twitter to study beliefs surrounding female reproductive health. Parkash has helped grow Duke SPIRE—a support system for undergraduates from diverse backgrounds with interests in STEM—into a “prestigious STEM-retention fellowship.” She is president of the Pakistani Students Association and a DSG senator, where she has “[strived] to increase transparency around visa-specific employment procedures.”
Parkash has also previously served as president of the Duke Actuarial Society and a teaching assistant for the statistics department.
Graduate and professional finalists
Jay Lusk, an MD-MBA candidate in the Fuqua School of Business and the School of Medicine; Edgar Virguez, Graduate School ‘22; and Nicole De Brigard and Yedidya “Didi” Yeshurun, both from the Law School, were selected as the graduate and professional finalists. Bios for the candidates will be available in the coming days.
The open meeting for undergraduates to meet their respective Young Trustee finalists is scheduled for March 15 from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The open meeting for graduate and professional students is the following day at the same time. Both meetings will be in Penn Pavilion.
Young Trustee selection process
The nominating committee for the Young Trustee is selected by the secretary to the Board of Trustees and chief of staff to the Duke president, currently Margaret Epps. This practice started last year, in 2021.
In prior Young Trustee election cycles, the YTNC membership was chosen by the University secretary and the DSG president. Any undergraduate student other than the DSG president was able to apply to be on the YTNC.
Both the Undergraduate and Graduate/Professional Young Trustee selection process underwent very similar revisions in 2021 in order to “increase awareness and understanding of the Young Trustee position, enhance transparency to ensure fairness and inclusion, and align with best practices in board governance for private universities,” Epps told The Chronicle last year.
The Chronicle previously broke down these changes and the details of the new selection process.
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Leah Boyd is a Pratt senior and a social chair of The Chronicle's 118th volume. She was previously editor-in-chief for Volume 117.
Nadia Bey, Trinity '23, was managing editor for The Chronicle's 117th volume and digital strategy director for Volume 118.